To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [284]
The news broke through, finally, at the end of October, but not to Haddington. It came to Simon in Edinburgh because his man, riding hard from Dunbar, pre-empted the arrival of a battered vessel struggling against wind and tide to reach Leith. And although he longed to proclaim what he knew, Simon had sense enough to keep quiet. The Priory was still uninformed the next day, when Willie Roger, tired of incense and discordant noises, led his class of young adults and children out into the sun for their music, and stayed to join in their games.
Jodi was there, and the Countess’s infants, although the Countess herself was at Court with her sister. There were also some of the choristers from the church of the Trinity, including a handsome man referred to by Roger as the Angel of the Annunciation, who also brought his two children. They had been given carriage from Edinburgh in the wagon-train of a merchant. The merchant had gone, but one of his wagons stood at the top of the field, full of the seed corn to be unloaded tomorrow.
The sun was bright, but the salt breeze was fresh. The little ones, wrapped in shawls, had been marshalled by Master Roger into a circle and were jumping about, shrieking words to his whistle while the older children wove a pattern around them. Every now and then they fell down. It was when the whistle broke off that Mistress Clémence first heard the squeak of the wheels, and looked up.
The wain at the top of the short slope was moving. The incline was bumpy, and at first the cart seemed to be coming quite slowly, its solid wood wheels knocking against outcrops of stone. There were more of these lower down, but the descent also got steeper, so that the heavy sacks in the wagon started to jump and to topple, and then to hurl themselves out, and bound and roll down the decline towards the children. A wheel came off and shot into the air, while the cart itself careered springing onwards towards them. The children started to scream.
Clémence seized Jodi under one arm and Mary’s son under the other and ran. Roger laid hands on another two and did the same, pushing shrieking children before him. Clémence looked over her shoulder. A sack, bursting beside her, nearly knocked her off her feet and Jodi squealed in renewed anguish; the other child was rhythmically hooting, and her apron was soaked with his urine. She saw the wheel hit the ground and strike a young girl, bouncing over her. The cart crashed down where the circle had been and began to slow, its bags scattered about it. Another wheel juddered free and rolled off, and the carcass came to a halt.
There were three children lying still on the grass, and the screaming was thin and continuous, like the sound of gulls over a shoal. She let the two children down on the grass, and began to run back.
Roger was running before her. A tall man passed her, shouting. ‘John! Muriella!’
She said, ‘They are safe. They stayed in the garden.’
She was kneeling by the first silent heap when a man threw himself down and, thrusting her aside, began to talk to the child. She did not know all the fathers: she could sympathise, but in an emergency there was no time for niceties. She said, ‘Please get back. This girl is hurt. She needs a doctor.’
‘I am a doctor,’ he said.
He didn’t look like one. His coat was crusted with salt and his cap, knocked askew, showed a wing of insubstantial pale hair and a section of cranium. She drew breath to object, and saw what his hands were doing. He was a doctor. She got up and left.
The second child was crying, thank God, and seemed to have only bruises. She took her head on her shoulder and let her weep, her eyes following the musician as he flung himself down by the third victim. It was not a child but a boy in his teens, one of the prebends from the church of the Trinity. He was lying perfectly quiet. Clémence